Self-absorption can be grating in memoirs by lesser writers; in Hustvedt’s capable hands, it opens a door to revelation.
Novelist Hustvedt (The Sorrows of an American, 2008, etc.) investigates the reason(s) she suddenly began shuddering violently while delivering a memorial talk about her father, more than two years after his death.
The author pursues her symptoms with Javertian devotion; her husband, writer Paul Auster, said she was moving beyond devotion into obsession. She read voraciously, attended lectures on brain science, visited a variety of medical and psychological specialists, underwent examinations and MRIs and took drugs. She also ruminated excessively. The result is a narrative that is alternately transparent and scientifically dense, frustrating and satisfying, conclusive and vague. She begins at the bedside of her dying father in 2004 in her hometown of Northfield, Minn., leaps ahead to her first shuddering episode (more followed) and presents her exhaustive research and its exhausting exegesis. She consulted texts from the ancient world, Freud and William James, and myriad contemporary thinkers, from the widely known (Steven Pinker) to the relatively obscure (Imants Baruss, a professor at King’s University College in Ontario). As Hustvedt tries to remember pivotal medical and psychological moments in her life—she heard voices as a child, as did a couple of her sisters, had an early quaking fever, suffered from fierce migraines, tried various drugs—she segues smoothly into a wonderful section about the nature of memory. She also considers dream research and moves steadily toward an integrative theory of personality, concluding that she and her symptoms are not separate. “Ambiguity does not obey logic,” she states plainly.
Self-absorption can be grating in memoirs by lesser writers; in Hustvedt’s capable hands, it opens a door to revelation.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9169-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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